On April 6-7, 2023, Georgian- (1,2,3,4) and Russian-language (1,2,3) Facebook users started circulating a video showing a church building being set on fire. According to the attached description, the church is located in Ukraine and was burned by Ukrainians. Some of the users claimed that the Orthodox Church depicted in the video was located in the village of Novopoltavka in Mykolaiv Oblast.
The video showing a church being set on fire is circulating with a false description. The video can be found on the Internet since 2013 and depicts a church in the Russian village of Ilyinka, not in Ukraine.
The description of the disseminated video is false. The church seen in the footage was located in the Russian village of Ilyinka and burned down in 2013. The original version of the video is available on one of the Russian-language YouTube channels.
Several other videos depicting the event are published on the same channel.
The distributed video was verified by the Strategic Communications and Information Security Center of the Ministry of Culture and Information Security of Ukraine. The statement published on the center’s website on April 6 notes that the video is being circulated with a false description, which is aimed at discrediting Ukrainians and weakening the fight against Russian influence.
This is not the first time when the shots of burning churches in Russia are presented as events happening in Ukraine with the aim to discredit the Ukrainian authorities or Ukrainians in general. A similar claim was verified by “Myth Detector” in March 2022. For more information, see our article:
The narrative about the Ukrainian government fighting the Church and Orthodoxy has been amplified since the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine asked the priests and monks of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra to leave the complex. Manipulative and false claims surrounding these processes were verified by “Myth Detector” a number of times:
- Kremlin Media Disseminates a Conspiracy about the Blackening of Crosses of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra
- Manipulative Claims about the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra
- Photomanipulation, as if an Icon of Bandera was Written for the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra
About the Sources
Some of the Facebook users that posted the above-mentioned video spread false information regularly. Namely, Merab Ratishvili, Khatia Janashia and Georgian Georgian, as well as the Russian-language account Злой Ёжик, were included in many articles of “Myth Detector” in the past.
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